Jackie Tileston: Instructions for Dissolution

Holly Johnson Gallery in Dallas is pleased to announce the opening of Jackie Tileston: Instructions for Dissolution, an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper. An opening reception for the artist will be held November 17, from 5:00 to 8:00 pm. The exhibition continues through Saturday, January 26, 2019. 

Jackie Tileston's paintings are heterotopic spaces in which diverse strategies and nomadic thinking create complex images that investigate the contemporary sublime and states of being. Tileston (b. Manila, Philippines) spent her childhood as an itinerant “Third Culture Kid”, living in the Philippines, India, England, and France, before moving to the US.  This intercultural mix and sense of belonging everywhere and nowhere has become the template for making abstract, visionary paintings. She has developed her own pictorial vocabulary and symbolism, a semiotics that incorporates references to an eclectic variety of sources:  geometric yantras, fragments of Ukiyo-e prints, fractals, digital photos, Chinese landscape, quantum physics, Western Romanticism, and patterns from around the world all feed the work.  Tileston creates hybrid, layered and contemplative spaces that explore ways to materialize the ephemeral through exuberant, grotesque, raucous, and baroquely differentiated forms.

Tileston most often works over a background of raw linen coated with rabbit skin glue. She masters atmospheric, misty washes that emulate J.M.W. Turner’s ecclesiastic skies and sets these to drift across the picture plane, over which she superimposes bouquets of multi-colored liquid fireworks of unknown hybrid shapes that float and orbit in nebulous chromatopias. 

The works included in Instructions for Dissolution embody her long-term devotion to yoga and meditation, as well as questioning how these ideas can be manifested visually, and what the social and political implications are. In a recent interview, Tileston said “The practices allow me to continuously regroup and reframe my experiences in the world according to something saner and more ecstatic than I might otherwise have access to.  I read a lot of yoga/tantra philosophy, and it definitely aligns with the ideas that are important to me in the studio – how things are made manifest through some sort of intelligent creative process, and then undergo dissolution in a continual process of change and evolution…Ongoing questions about the real and unreal, a commitment to some sort of celebration of what is here in our experience and also beyond, the totality and incomprehensibility and sheer weirdness of it all.”

Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions in Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, and Dallas, and group exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum (Houston), Art in General and the Painting Center (New York), and the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, Art Museum of South Texas, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, West Virginia University Art Museum, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Tileston has a B.A. from Yale University (1983) and MFA from Indiana University (1988). She is the recipient of the Core Fellowship Residency at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (1988-1990), the Pew Fellowship in the Arts (2004), the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency (2005), the Guggenheim Fellowship (2006), and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (2011) and recent residency (2017). She lives in Philadelphia, where she is an Associate Professor in Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania.

Holly Johnson Gallery is located at 1845 Levee Street; Suite #100; Dallas, Texas 75207. Gallery hours are 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday. For more information call 214-369-0169, or email info@hollyjohnsongallery.com, or visit www.hollyjohnsongallery.com.